Real Life In Malaysia ... and everywhere

What you see is not always what you get. Real people. Real life. Questions. And surprising answers ...

On knowledge sharing and dissemination

... when circulating a working paper for comments, never put on "citations only permitted with the permission of author"

or "no parts of this paper can be used without permission of author". Rather, say "when using parts of this paper please give proper citation and help yourself". Be delighted if someone wants to quote you ... (p.7)

Thursday, 7 August 2014

Allah is
the Light of the heavens and the earth. The Parable of His Light is as
if there were a Niche and within it a Lamp: the Lamp enclosed in Glass:
the glass as it were a brilliant star: Lit from a blessed Tree, an
Olive, neither of the east nor of the west, whose oil is well-nigh
luminous, though fire scarce touched it: Light upon Light! Allah doth
guide whom He will to His Light: Allah doth set forth Parables for men:
and Allah doth know all things.

His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in
Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their
best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being
clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the
civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in
Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any
other country.[1]

On November 1918 the large group of Palestinian Arab dignitaries and
representatives of political associations addressed a petition to the
British authorities in which they denounced the declaration. The
document stated:

...we always sympathized profoundly with the persecuted Jews and
their misfortunes in other countries... but there is wide difference
between such sympathy and the acceptance of such a nation...ruling over
us and disposing of our affairs.[31]

Friday, 1 August 2014

For more than five years, Brandon Bryant worked in an oblong,
windowless container about the size of a trailer, where the
air-conditioning was kept at 17 degrees Celsius (63 degrees Fahrenheit)
and, for security reasons, the door couldn't be opened. Bryant and his
coworkers sat in front of 14 computer monitors and four keyboards. When
Bryant pressed a button in New Mexico, someone died on the other side of
the world.

The container is filled with the humming of computers. It's the brain
of a drone, known as a cockpit in Air Force parlance. But the pilots in
the container aren't flying through the air. They're just sitting at the
controls.

Bryant was one of them, and he remembers one incident very clearly
when a Predator drone was circling in a figure-eight pattern in the sky
above Afghanistan, more than 10,000 kilometers (6,250 miles) away. There
was a flat-roofed house made of mud, with a shed used to hold goats in
the crosshairs, as Bryant recalls. When he received the order to fire,
he pressed a button with his left hand and marked the roof with a laser.
The pilot sitting next to him pressed the trigger on a joystick,
causing the drone to launch a Hellfire missile. There were 16 seconds
left until impact.

"These moments are like in slow motion," he says today. Images taken
with an infrared camera attached to the drone appeared on his monitor,
transmitted by satellite, with a two-to-five-second time delay.

With seven seconds left to go, there was no one to be seen on the
ground. Bryant could still have diverted the missile at that point. Then
it was down to three seconds. Bryant felt as if he had to count each
individual pixel on the monitor. Suddenly a child walked around the
corner, he says.

Second zero was the moment in which Bryant's digital world collided
with the real one in a village between Baghlan and Mazar-e-Sharif.

Bryant saw a flash on the screen: the explosion. Parts of the
building collapsed. The child had disappeared. Bryant had a sick feeling
in his stomach.

"Did we just kill a kid?" he asked the man sitting next to him.

"Yeah, I guess that was a kid," the pilot replied.

"Was that a kid?" they wrote into a chat window on the monitor.

Then, someone they didn't know answered, someone sitting in a
military command center somewhere in the world who had observed their
attack.